The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has driven technologies that have been known and available and relatively quiescent over the years. Two of these technologies are the Internet related distribution and object oriented programming systems. Both of these technologies are embodied in the use of object oriented technology and the Java programming system, in particular, for a wide variety of consumer and business purposes over the Internet or Web or like private networks. For details and background with respect to the Java system, reference may be made to a typical text, Just Java, 2nd Edition, Peter van der Linden, Sun Microsystems, 1997. With the development and rapid expansion of the Web and other like networks, hypertext markup languages became the primary vehicle for distribution of data over such networks. A basic hypertext language, HTML, is described in detail in the above-entitled Just Java text, particularly at Chapter 7, pp. 249-268, dealing with the handling of Web pages; and also in the text, Mastering the Internet, G. H. Cady et al., published by Sybex Inc., Alameda, Calif., 1996, particularly at pp. 637-642, on HTML in the formation of Web pages. The Web pages are implemented so as to be used for the distribution of Web documents containing text, images, both still and moving, and sound, as well as programs.
The rapid expansion of people, businesses and organizations with Web or Internet (used interchangeably) access, has resulted in the widespread use of the Web for business, e.g. e-business and like electronic business, educational, medical and legal transactions. The complexity of the interrelationships involved in these transactions has made it common to handle and distribute Web or like private network documents having multiple contents respectively from multiple sources on the network. Such sources may be individual users at network display stations, as well as network databases that provide already developed and stored content. With the greater reliance on the impersonal network communication, there is less personal contact between the contributors of the content of these network documents. This makes it much harder for a participating user in a network transaction to recognize who contributed what to the document. The above cross-referenced copending application provides an implementation for tracking, storing and displaying via visual indicators, the sources of the various content portions in any markup language document created or rendered from multiple sources.
While this is an effective implementation in tracking Web or like network sources of document content portions, further problems are encountered when the document being created from multiple content sources has content portions that require sets of content reviews. The results of these content reviews are very important to both the host controlling the document sources, as well as to those creating the multiple content portions for the multiple content network document. In today's electronic commerce, for example, in the creation of network documents with content portions from multiple sources, the content portions of the variety of sources may have been subjected to sets of content reviews for many purposes. For example, a business company preparing to ship thousands of a specially designed and manufactured device may be generating a multi-content Web document having sets of reviews including approved legal reviews, approved accounting reviews, approved quality reviews, as well as time stamps and like commitments. Accordingly, in such a multiple content portioned network, e.g. Web documents, it is important not only to be enabled to identify the sources of the portions but to be able to present to the user or viewer at a display terminal, a user friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that shows the status of reviews.